


Three Times Rachel Had Marco's Back, and One Time He Had Hers

by language_escapes



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen, Male-Female Friendship, POV Character of Color
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-26
Updated: 2013-06-26
Packaged: 2017-12-16 07:09:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/859304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/language_escapes/pseuds/language_escapes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marco and Rachel have an unusual relationship, but they always have each others backs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Times Rachel Had Marco's Back, and One Time He Had Hers

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because you cannot tell me that Jake, Rachel, and Marco all grew up within a few blocks of one another and expect me to believe they barely knew each other at the start of the series. Nope. Not buying it.
> 
> This fic contains: a panic attack, discussion of the death of a mother, and canon-typical language (including ableist and sexist language).

**One**

Marco is five, and it is his first day of kindergarten, and even though his mom told him this would be wonderful and exciting and she’s so proud of him, and his dad told him that he loved him and that school was going to be so good for him, he’s pretty sure that school sucks.

He shouldn’t use the word sucks, but he does, and he kicks the leg of the table in irritation even as he mutters it under his breath.

First of all, his friend Jake, who lives down the street and has a really cool dog (and he knows his dad is allergic, but it isn’t fair that Jake gets a dog and he doesn’t) isn’t in his class. Which he knew! Going in! He knew! His mom and Jake’s mom compared their teachers and told them that they wouldn’t be in the same class, so Marco knew. But knowing something in advance doesn’t make anything better, as it turns out, and it sucks that he has to sit next to some kid named Mike, who smells kinda funny, like grape bubble gum that’s been chewed for too long.

(Marco hates grape bubblegum. It smells like medicine.)

Second, school sucks because they want to teach him how to read.

Marco knows how to read. His mom and dad taught him. He’s been reading for years. Like, two of them. Maybe. He has told the teacher at least nineteen times he knows how to read.

Also, he can totally count up to nineteen, he can do that. Sure, he can’t go past nineteen, but he’s good up till that point.

Instead, the teacher gave him his little reader thing with all the colorless pictures and told him to color them in, that they’ll be learning the alphabet later.

Third, school sucks hardest of all because Marco doesn’t have any crayons to color with. Apparently, crayons are a thing that all the other kids have, except him, and school sucks because no one wants to share with him.

Marco glares down at his colorless alphabet book. If Jake were in class with him, Jake would share. Because Jake doesn’t suck.

“Sucks,” he whispers, and kicks the table again.

“Do you mind?” someone asks, sounding annoyed. Marco looks up. He has to sit next to Mike, but there are two other people at his table. One is a girl named Ashley, who is still staring determinedly down at her book, a red crayon gripped in her hand. The other is a pretty girl in pink named Rachel. She’s glaring at him.

Marco sticks his tongue out at her. “No, I don’t,” he says.

Rachel sticks her tongue back at him. He’s kinda surprised by that. The last girl he did that to ran away crying. Okay, so maybe he had a bunch of chewed up food on his tongue last time, but still. No one has ever stuck their tongue out at him before. Not even Jake.

Well, he isn’t gonna let some girl get away with that. He puts his thumb on the tip of his nose and lifts it up. It’s been at least an hour since he blew his nose. He’s pretty sure he’s got some good boogers in there.

Rachel looks unimpressed. She reaches up and very, very casually flips her eyelids inside out.

“Ack!” he yells, startled. The teacher looks at him sharply, and he immediately points at Rachel. It’s her fault he yelled. She was being gross, way grosser than him, and he’s had a cold for, like, a week.

Rachel is looking down at her book, carefully coloring a pink elephant.

Their teacher frowns at him. “Marco, for someone who keeps insisting he knows how to read, you haven’t managed to accomplish much, have you? I suggest you get to work.”

She doesn’t seem to realize he doesn’t have any crayons, and Marco isn’t going to ask her now, not after she was mean to him. He looks back down at his stupid book, with its stupid pictures, and wishes he had some stupid crayons, and that this stupid, stupid day would end, because school is stupid.

“Sucks,” he mutters, looking down at the apple that he would color green, and draw some worms in, if only he had some stupid crayons.

Someone nails his shin, and he nearly yelps, but when he looks up, Rachel is watching him, smiling to herself. She very carefully scoots her perfect pink plastic pencil box over at him, crayons full to the brim.

“Don’t break them,” she whispers, and then looks back down at her book, coloring in her purple frog.

Watching her, he picks out a green crayon. She doesn’t look up at him again, seems intent on ignoring him, so he puts crayon to the dumb book and starts coloring. Every now and then he looks up to see how she’s doing, what letter she’s at, what color she’s making her horse and her iguana and her jaguar (and why are they all animals, that’s what he wants to know, his ABC books have, like, balloons and xylophones and suddenly he really wants to see what X is, if there’s an animal that starts with X, because that would be really cool). She colors inside the lines, but all her pictures are in weird, bold colors. Kangaroos with red polka dots. Lions with green manes and blue bodies. They’re pretty, but they aren’t real.

He kinda likes that.

Maybe school isn’t going to suck after all.

**Two**

One of the great things about growing up in a neighborhood likes theirs is that the birthday parties are epic.

Jake is turning eight, and his parents are hosting a neighborhood wide water fight. It’s pretty awesome, and his mom got him a new Super Soaker so that he could take out the competition. His mom is so cool- she understands his rivalry with those two boys who live across the street. And Jake has promised to watch his six- that’s a military term, Marco read it in a book about Marines- so he can nail them.

Except that Jake is busy getting doused by the hose by his brother, Tom, and having water balloons chucked at him, courtesy of his cousin Saddler. Marco would rush to help him- Jake might not have his back, but Marco is always going to have Jake’s, he’s promised him that, they even did a spit handshake like they saw in a movie- except that he’s been cornered by Rachel.

Marco’s known since Jake’s sixth birthday party that the Rachel who shared her crayons with him in kindergarten (all year long, since he was too stubborn to just ask his mom to get him some) is the same Crazy Cousin Rachel that sat on Jake’s head when he was four to make him give her his cookie, the same Rachel who lives only two blocks from them both. They play together, sometimes, when there’s no one else around, or when she’s playing at Jake’s house. They make a good team, the three of them, and even though Marco would never go so far as to call Rachel his friend, he definitely thought she wouldn’t soak him.

But she’s got him backed against the house, two water pistols in her hand, looking weirdly dangerous even though she’s wearing a two piece bathing suit with flowers on it.

“You’re dead, Marco,” she says gleefully, and Marco pushes himself further back and closes his eyes, hoping she’ll make it quick.

“Oooo, look, baby Marco’s getting beaten by a _girl_ ,” someone shouts, and Marco immediately cringes.

See, it’s not that he wanted to soak the two boys from across the street (Alan and Tommy) because he’s mean or anything. He wanted to soak them because they make fun of him for being smaller than everyone else, and because he sometimes slips and speaks in Spanish in front of them, and because he isn’t exactly the first one into a fight, okay? He’s the kind of kid who likes to live to fight another day, although preferably without the ‘fighting’ part of the ‘another day’. And Alan and Tommy, they’ve basically made it their mission to harass and humiliate him.

Which sucks. Especially since it’s going to happen in front of Rachel, who is really cool. Not that he’ll ever tell her that.

Rachel doesn’t soak him. He opens his eyes tentatively, prepared to get jumped at any moment. Her water pistols are still aimed at him, but she’s frowning a little, looking over at Alan and Tommy. She squints at them, and then looks back at him.

“Are those the two boys that Jake said made you cry the other day?”

Marco is going to kill Jake. Forget their spit handshake. It was gross and stupid anyway. 

“… maybe,” he says sullenly. “Look, just soak me already, okay? Make it quick.”

Rachel frowns again, and then snorts, tossing her hair. She looks over at Tommy and Alan, scowling and looking almost dangerous, if a seven-year-old in a pink, flowery bikini is able to look like that. “Hey! Are you saying a girl can’t kick a guy’s butt?”

Alan bursts into laughter and Tommy makes a weird face at her. Marco is pretty sure it’s meant to be a sneer. “I’d like to see you try, blondie!” he yells over at her.

Rachel laughs, a giggle that Marco knows is the precursor to some serious rule breaking. She giggles like that whenever they go into Jake’s attic, which is forbidden, or when they climb the tree on the playground, even though the rules say they aren’t allowed.

“Get your gun, Marco,” Rachel says, still giggling. “I don’t want them to see me try; I want them to see me win.”

He glances for just a second at Jake (he may be ticked that Jake told Rachel he cried, but he still did a spit handshake, and those things matter), but Jake has been joined by some girl named Cassie that Rachel brought with her, and he seems to be doing better against Tom and Saddler (which- okay, he’s using Cassie as a human shield, but she’s laughing, so he’ll take it as win), so Marco nods. “Got your back, She-Ra,” he says.

“Oh please,” Rachel says, aiming her pistols at Tommy. “Aim for the eyes.”

**Three**

He’s skipping class. He’s never done that before. He’s not exactly the best student around. He goofs off and doesn’t always try. But he’s kept to the rules, been good.

He doesn’t care.

His mom is dead. Keeping to the rules, being good- he did all of those, and his mom is still dead.

The first week after she died, his teachers were gentle with him. Looked at him with soft, sad eyes. Didn’t call on him in class, even though the week before she died they’d called on him all the time. Didn’t yell at him for falling asleep on his desk, even though the week before she died one of his teachers taped his hands down as a joke and another one dropped a textbook by his head to teach him a lesson. Didn’t berate him for not turning his homework, even though the week before she died he got hauled up to the front of the class and had to explain, in excruciating detail, why he had decided that WWF wrestling was more important than his future.

It’s amazing what can change in a week.

What pity can do.

Marco hates it.

It’s week two, now. Fifteen days, to be exact. Half a month. And his teachers are still being quiet and calm with him, like he’s a caged animal that’s going to bolt the second he can. It’s stupid, and it’s awful, and his mom is _dead_ , his life has changed forever, can’t they at least do him the courtesy of letting some part of his life be normal? Now that nothing will ever be normal again?

Going to English, having to watch his teacher carefully avoid his eyes for another day- he couldn’t do that today. Not again.

So he skipped.

School sucks, anyway. 

Okay, so he probably should have gone a little further than down the hall. Probably should have hidden in the bathroom. Maybe even actually left the school. But- he’s never actually skipped class before, and he can still remember his mom telling him how wonderful and exciting school would be. That she was proud of him. She took about a thousand photos of him, and smoothed his hair down, tugged his clothes straight, kissed him on the forehead and the cheek and the top of his head…

Something in his chest seizes up. He sticks his hands in his hair, tugging on it. He’s pretty sure he’s going to rip all his hair out at his rate, but it’s the only thing that helps him keep panic attacks away. He’s had three since his mom died. He had to look up what they were himself- his dad didn’t notice. He thought he was dying, the first time. Thought he was eleven and having a heart attack. Now he knows what’s coming, so he just tips his head down on his knees and yanks on his hair and tries to get himself to remember that he isn’t actually dying. That he can still breathe.

The part of him that can still laugh thinks it’s pretty darn funny that he feels like he’s suffocating when it’s his mom who drowned.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Great. Just when the day couldn’t get any worse.

Marco looks up, stealing just a quick glance and scowling as fiercely as he can at Rachel. He doesn’t even know why she’s out of class. Rachel’s a model student, unlike him. She’d never skip class. He’s had three teachers this year tell him that he should be a little more like his friend Jake’s cousin, Rachel. They don’t seem to know that Rachel once snuck into the school after hours with him and Jake when they were nine, or that Rachel’s the one that stole all the chalk out of every classroom when they were in fifth grade.

He doesn’t see her much anymore. He’s eleven; he doesn’t do play dates anymore, or run around the neighborhood pretending he’s a spy. He shoots hoops with Jake, who wants to be on the basketball team like his brother, and plays video games. And Rachel doesn’t hang out at Jake’s house so much these days, with her parents getting divorced and everything. At the beginning, she was over there all the time- Marco’s pretty sure he even caught her crying, once, but he’d just sat down next to her and offered her some Oreos, and then she’d kicked Jake’s butt at Mortal Kombat. But after the divorce, she just stopped coming over.

He’s not going to say that he misses her or anything. They were never really friends. But maybe he wishes she were around more often. 

But not now.

“Go away,” he says, managing to make it even sound somewhat normal even though he feels like all the oxygen is gone from the hall. He can hear his lungs squeaking. He’s pretty much drenched in sweat, and oh hey, yep, now he’s feeling dizzy. He really does not want to be having a panic attack in front of Rachel. Jake, if he had to. Jake would know what to do. Jake always knows what to do.

Rachel looks at him for just a moment, then says, “There’s a hall monitor coming. I’ll go scare him off. Don’t move.”

He nearly laughs as she walks quickly away, because it isn’t like he’s going anywhere anytime soon. He drops his head back against his knees, forcing himself to breathe.

He can hear Rachel around the corner, telling a hall monitor that someone dropped a cherry bomb in one of the bathroom’s on the other side of the school. She sounds urgent, worried, and confident. She’s a pretty good liar, Rachel. The hall monitor tells her to go get someone from the office, and then Marco hears the sound of sneakers going in the opposite direction.

A second later, Rachel sits down next to him, tucking her legs up pretzel-style.

“Still want me to go away?” Rachel asks, a smirk in her voice.

Marco doesn’t look up at her. He can see her legs, and that’s okay- Rachel has great legs- but he can’t see her face right now. 

“Still wish you weren’t talking,” he says as sharply as he can. It doesn’t sound very sharp. It sounds muddled and sad.

And God, he doesn’t want to sound sad.

Rachel laughs. “Hey, that’s my line! I’m supposed to tell you to shut up, remember?”

He smiles. Just a little bit. He can’t help it. But it makes it easier, somehow.

She sits with him the entire time, talking about classes and how she’s pretty sure she’s on track to be an honor student for all four quarters; about the fact that she’s still messing up on the balance beam, but her coach won’t just let her switch to the parallel bars or horse on a permanent basis, something about improving her weaknesses to be a well-rounded gymnast; about how she thinks the new skirt she bought makes her look short, and she can’t have that, next thing she’ll look like _him_.

It’s good. It’s nice, to have someone treat him like they did two weeks ago.

“You’re not that much taller than me,” he says, interrupting her monologue about how he’s like something out of Munchkin Land. He sits up and looks at her. His chest doesn’t hurt so much. His heart’s still jumping a bit, but the worst is over.

Rachel smirks at him. “I’m, like, six inches taller than you, Marco. When we stand next to each other I can tell you if the part in your hair is messed up.”

“Just you wait,” Marco announces, resting his head against the wall and ignoring the fact that even when sitting next to each other she still towers over him, “in two years, I’ll be taller than you, and you’ll regret making all those short jokes.”

“They aren’t jokes, Marco. They’re facts. I don’t think you should be skipping class if you can’t tell the difference.”

Marco punches her lightly on the shoulder. Rachel punches him right back, way harder. Then she nudges him. “You okay now?”

Her face doesn’t change. There’s no sudden outpouring of pity, no sad glances or soft words. She’s grinning at him, and his shoulder still hurts. “Yeah,” he says, surprising himself. “I’m okay now.”

“Good,” Rachel says. She stands up, offers him a hand. He takes it and she pulls him to his feet. She really is about six inches taller than him. That blows. “C’mon, next period is about to start. I want to watch Ms. Harmon act like an idiot as she tries to figure out whether or not she should ask you to diagram the sentence.”

He wrinkles his nose in disgust. “Maybe the pity thing could last another day or two,” he tells Rachel. “Because I still have no idea what sweet sixteen brackets have to do with grammar.”

Rachel bumps him with her shoulder. “Maybe I’ll let you copy my homework. Just this once.”

**and one**

He’s asleep when she slides through his window.

Okay, no. He wasn’t actually asleep. He was trying to sleep, and failing miserably, but that isn’t the point. The point is, it’s night, and he’s in his makeshift bed in his makeshift cabin in the Hork-Bajir valley when Rachel climbs in through his window.

He’s already partially morphed to gorilla when she gets all the way in. He’d started the morph when he heard the footsteps approaching his window, suddenly convinced that the Yeerks had found him, found his parents, found the free Hork-Bajir. He reverses the morph, feeling annoyed. Usually, if any of the Animorphs are breaking into each other’s rooms at night, they at least are in owl morph or bird of prey morph. It’s only slightly less terrifying, but still. Less terrifying is the way to go, in Marco’s book.

“Rachel,” he whispers as soon as he can speak again. “What are you doing here?”

He regrets it the minute he says it. The windows are small in the cabin he shares with his parents, but they let in enough moonlight for him to see her face. She looks… haggard. Sick. Scared. All sorts of things that Rachel never is. Or, if she is, never shows him. 

“Can I-” Rachel pauses, scans the room, looks away. “Can I stay here, for a while?”

Marco blinks, and then forces himself into a half-assed leer. His heart isn’t really in it, and she probably knows that, but he’ll try. “I always knew you wanted me,” he says, but then he scoots over, making room for her on the mattress. Tries to make himself small- smaller- and less threatening. He’s never been threatening a day in his life in his regular body, but he likes to think it’ll help her out.

She- drifts over, it’s the only way he can describe it. Marco stares at her, scared.

Marco has been friends with Jake since he was three and he pushed Jake off the teeter-totter, best friends since they were seven and Jake ripped his jeans climbing a fence and came to hide at Marco’s house, too scared to tell his parents what he did. But he’s known Rachel for almost as long- since kindergarten, which is weird to think about. Nobody seems to remember that they grew up together, that Rachel tried to wax Marco’s legs using Barbie bandaids when they were seven, that Marco failed to prove that safety scissors were useless when he chopped off a chunk of Rachel’s hair at the age of eight, that they both managed to goad Jake into drawing a mustache on his face using permanent marker- not that he knew it was permanent, at the time. Sometimes, Marco forgets that they grew up together, especially when he sees Rachel ripping a Taxxon apart and can’t see the little girl in pink who shared her crayons with him anymore.

But the point is, he grew up with Rachel just as much as he grew up with Jake, and he’s never, not once, not even during the past three years of hell on earth, seen her look so lost.

“In your dreams, Marco,” Rachel says, and sits next to him.

“Well, yeah,” he says, still striving for jokes and knowing that he’s falling flat. “But you woke me up, so now I don’t even have those.”

Not even a twitch of a smile. Marco sucks his bottom lip in between his teeth and bites down.

“So, what brings you to Chez Marco?” he asks. “It can’t be our décor; I’m pretty sure you don’t go for the rustic look.”

Rachel looks down at her hands. There’s a huge gap between them on the bed. If Marco was the hugging type, he’d hug her. He’d braid her hair and paint her nails if it would get her to stop looking like that. Hell, he’d let her braid _his_ hair and paint _his_ nails if it would help.

“I need you to be serious for a minute,” she says.

“One minute, got it. I’ll time us, so we don’t get too creeped out.”

That brings a flicker of a smile, but it’s there and gone again in the time it takes him to blink. “How do you do it?” she asks. Before he can ask her to clarify, she continues. “How do you do bad things, things you know are wrong, and still live with yourself?”

Marco freezes. That’s… a bit too serious for him. Way too serious for him. If he’s honest with himself- which he pretty much tries to be, he lies all the time, but he can’t afford to lie to himself- that subject will always be too serious for him. Talking about that would require him to think about it, and that- that’s a road best left untraveled.

But Rachel is looking at him now, waiting for his answer. And Rachel, more than anyone else, even Jake, has only ever been honest with him. 

He might as well return the favour.

“Mostly? I don’t think about it,” he confesses. “I shove it as far away from me as I can.”

“Does that work?”

He swallows. “Don’t you think this is a better conversation for Cassie? She’s the one who thinks about morals and what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Rachel huffs out a soft, unhappy laugh. Marco’s kinda perfected those; he can recognize them a mile away. “That’s why I can’t talk to her.”

Marco understands instantly. “Ah, I see. You want to talk to the nasty bastard who was able to plan the murder of his mom. Got it.”

Strangely, saying it out loud doesn’t hurt. It should, he thinks. It should make him angry that Rachel came to him for that. But it doesn’t, and even though the actual planning hurt, the fact that he was able to do it? Didn’t. It’s just a part of who he is.

If Rachel needs that part of him, sure, he’s got her back.

Rachel looks pained, and tucks her hair behind her ear. Marco decides to stop her from saying anything. “Hey, no, I get it,” he says, waving a hand. It isn’t as if he didn’t have a breakdown about this a while back. At least she isn’t mixing morphs and making poo-bears. “You’ve done bad things, and you’re wondering if that means you’re a bad person, especially since you have Cassie and Jake who agonize over everything and tear themselves apart. It’s hard, to stand next to them.”

“They’re the good guys,” Rachel says quietly. She isn’t looking at him anymore, but he recognizes the way she says that. It has the tone of a mantra. Something she’s told herself a thousand times, just to make sure she can remember it.

“They are,” Marco says easily. “Doesn’t make us the bad guys.”

“What does that make us, then?”

“I don’t know,” he tells her, giving her the most honest and most hurtful answer he has. He doesn’t want to be mean- not right now- but he and Rachel, this is what they do. If they aren’t bickering, they’re telling each other the horrible truth.

And truth, Marco has found, is pretty much universally awful.

“I don’t know,” he says again, and he scoots over toward her, leaning his shoulder against hers. “And I’m going to be honest, you scare me a little- although you always have, ever since you were five and kicking me in the shins and getting me in trouble with the teachers, so that isn’t much of a change. But Rachel?”

She looks down at him, and he nudges her shoulder. “My mom is here because of you,” he says. “And that’s-” he pauses, swallows around the sudden thickness in his throat, “That’s good. That’s- that’s the best thing that’s happened to me in years. You saved my mom, and that’s good. You do good things. That’s what matters.”

Rachel doesn’t say anything for a very long time. Long enough that Marco actually begins to fall asleep on her shoulder, and he’s pretty sure she’ll never forgive him if he drools on her, even if it’s just her morphing suit. He’s drifting off when she says, very softly, “I killed someone.”

He forces his eyes open, rubs them a few times. Tries to focus on her again. “Did you enjoy it?” he asks. It’s a dumb question- she wouldn’t be sitting in his cabin in the middle of the night if she did. But he wants her to hear herself say it.

“No,” she says.

“Do you want to do it again?”

“No.”

“Well, okay then. Okay.”

“Don’t you want to know who? Or why?”

She looks tired, and sad, but less lost and desperate. Marco takes it as a good thing. “Do you want to tell me?”

“Not really.”

“Then no. I don’t need to know who or why.”

She’s quiet again, and Marco takes his chance while he can. “Now, I think you’ve definitely gotten more than one minute of seriousness from me. Can I go back to telling bad jokes and annoying you? I think I may have pulled my spleen muscle being serious.”

Rachel laughs, and he thinks that angels should appear with their trumpets playing hallelujah, because he got her to laugh, and if he can still make Rachel laugh despite herself, then she’ll be all right, in the end. “Marco, I’ve decided- we need to end this war soon, just to get you back to school. You need it.”

“Oh, well, as long as we’ve got our priorities straight. We need to end the war so I can go to school, that sounds about right.”

Rachel laughs again and smiles at him. It’s strained, but there. He’ll take it.

“You want to stay?” he asks. Before she can yell at him, he says, “There’s a couch thing made out of, like, pine needles and some kind of bark thread, maybe caterpillar silk?- I wasn’t paying attention- so I can sleep there. Let you get your beauty sleep.”

“Not like I need it,” she says, tossing her hair with the supreme confidence of someone who knows she’s gorgeous. He hates her a little for it. An hour or two ago she looked like the world was ending, and she was still perfectly coiffed. He looks like Euclid, if Euclid had gotten run over a couple of times and then dunked in a vat of tree sap. The whole no-indoor-plumbing thing is really doing a number on his cuteness level.

“Whatever, Xena. Are you staying or not?”

“I’ll stay,” she says. He nods and gets up, but she grabs his wrist. “You can stay, too. Just keep your hands to yourself.” When he gives her a look, she rolls her eyes. “Maybe pine needles and caterpillar silk make a good couch for Hork-Bajir, but you’re a whiny little diva, Marco. You need a regular mattress. And I, for one, do not want to have to listen to you complain about the bruises on your bony butt for the next three days.”

“You’ve noticed my butt; I’m thrilled beyond words.”

“Then why are you still talking?”

He lies down next to the wall. She sticks a pillow between them and then lays down, sighing quietly. Without really thinking about it, he slings an arm over her waist, just like he did when he, Rachel, and Jake would watch movies together. “Okay?”

“Yeah.”

He waits until her breathing evens out a little and then, because he just can’t help himself, says, “If Tobias catches you sneaking out my window in the morning, I’m telling him stories about how you needed me in the night.”

Rachel’s ribs twitch beneath his hand. He remembers that twitch. He has memorized that twitch. That twitch means she is both laughing and about ten seconds from smothering him with a pillow. That twitch is why he’s never seen the end of _The Neverending Story_. That twitch is why he presumes that _The Neverending Story_ is, in fact, neverending.

“Tell him that and I’ll tell him about the time I caught you measuring your dick in Jake’s bathroom.”

“I take back everything I said about you being a good person.”

He laughs when the pillow hits him in the face.


End file.
